Pandora’s Box: A metaphor for Brexit?
The Pandora myth refers to the endless complications or trouble arising from a single, simple miscalculation. Once opened, affecting “the curse of mankind”, it cannot be closed.
My intention in this article is to attempt an understanding of the social forces, dynamics and processes that have precipitated the vote to leave the European Union and that have played out subsequently in the social and political arena. I intend to continue and expand the arguments presented in my papers previously published in Contexts (Birchmore, 2011), and to then use these conceptualisations, as a “case study”, to understand some of the underlying social dynamics that led to the Brexit vote. This is, of course, a partial view, limited by my prejudices, knowledge and understandings.
In my 2011 articles I focus on the social and political ideologies and associated practices (neo-liberal economic theory, the increasing use of Fordist and Taylorist methods, the rise of managerialism and market solutions, the emphasis on “efficiency”, cost savings and performance management) that have produced significant changes in public service organisations since the early 1980’s. These changes have resulted in the increasing routinisation and standardisation of work, a deskilling of the workforce, loss of professional autonomy and, in the case of mental health services, an increased reliance on medical model conceptualisations. I note that these changes in the organisation of work tends to produce an unhappy and demotivated workforce, undermines collectivism and solidarity, and leads to an increase in bullying and scapegoating in organisations. All of these factors increase anxiety in the organisation and the use of defensive security operations to defend against these anxieties. In these papers I ask what are the psychological consequences for individuals working within these systems. I described how professional practice is becoming increasingly circumscribed, routinised, and proceduralised, influenced as it has been by the joint ideological forces of neo-liberal political theory and practice, and contemporary ideas of efficient organisational functioning based on Fordist and Taylorist principles, a set of practices and principles of organisational control summarised in the literature on New Managerialism or The New Public Management. I also suggested that these ideologies contain a profound anti-group or collectivist dynamic.
A Literature Review
“Ours is a populist age – instinctively hostile to the values of the old elites … To be sure, it is also a hyper-individualist age. But despite appearances to the contrary, populism and hyper-individualism go together. A mass of disaggregated individuals, in a society in which the public realm has been demeaned and where public trust seems to be vanishing, is more likely to respond to a populist appeal than to any other. Populist languages make no demand on their listeners; they flatter the emotions; and they place the burdens of freedom on someone else’s shoulders”. (Marquand, 2014.)
The following scan of the relevant literature provides further evidence and perspectives and expands on the arguments I outline above.
For example, Helbing (2009) discussed the unpredicted effects that can occur when top-down efficiency driven change initiatives focus on narrow output targets. He states that “Decision-makers attempt to regulate all details by legislation, administrative procedures, project definitions, etc. Procedures become complicated and time-consuming, sensitive to gaps, prone to failures, and often go along with unanticipated side effects and costs”. These failures, in his view, are created because the model assumes that people behave in predictable ways and can be treated as if they were machines in part of a system. The reality is that people are in relationships within an interconnected system and are complex, motivated, and sometimes irrational – this is a complex living system, in which each part is affected by changes in a single part and multiple changes can create complex reactions, rather than a machine.
Carlisle (2011) writes that “Increased bureaucracy absorbs increasing numbers of managers in activities which are essentially nonproductive. Some have prioritized short-term outputs with little regard for their means of achievement. There is mounting evidence to suggest that managerialism is conducive to the emergence of toxic work place cultures which passively (and in some cases actively) encourage ‘destructive leadership’ ‘abusive supervision’ and the normalization of bullying, victimization and scape-goating (Namie & Namie, 2000; Tepper et al, 2004; Tepper et al, 2006). McAvoy and Murtagh (2003) also note the development of “a deadly combination of economic rationalism, increasing competition, ‘‘downsizing,’’ and the current fashion for tough, dynamic, ‘‘macho’’ management styles create an environment in which ‘toxic’ workplaces supportive of bullying can easily emerge. A recent study concluded that “destructive forms of leadership behaviours are highly prevalent in managerialist organizational cultures” (Aasland et al, 2009). These cultures inevitable impair staff morale and therefore the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation.
Matson and Prusak (2010) point out that rigid hierarchical controls erect social and cultural barriers which prevent and discourage some of the ‘right people’ from properly engaging. In one commonly stated view in the New Managerialism literature, meeting organisational needs as against meeting the needs of patients has become a central professional task, involving “the meeting of explicit, pre-specified outcomes, objectives or targets as the chief way in which the accountability of [professionals] may be secured”, amounting to “the deformation of professional formation and the undermining of professional judgement” (Green, 2009). Thus, the completion of paperwork within specified timetables is taken as evidence of effectiveness, reduced to the task of filling in forms as quickly as possible. The assessment of risk becomes another form filling activity.
Audit is one aspect of managerialism and the emphasis on performance in public services. Michael Power, in The Audit Society (1997), writes that in relation to one aspect of new managerial thinking, auditing has spread from the financial sphere to public administration, with damaging consequences. He questions whether audit serves the purposes for which it was intended and says that good auditing only ends up as conformity to agreed procedures, only providing reassurance that everything is in order but without any guarantee that the audit enables professionals to make better decisions. Performance auditing, he believes, can create a complete tier of management that collects information of little relevance to actual performance. He writes, “audits are rationalized rituals of inspection which produce comfort, and hence organizational legitimacy”. More damagingly, auditing may affect how professionals make decisions, in a kind of colonisation of clinical decision making, limiting perceptions, actions and creativity in an arena of reward and motivation determined by the audit culture. It is also, if entirely useless in producing better care, costly to an organisation.
Andrew Cooper is another therapist who writes about audit culture. He says:
“We now live in a relentlessly superintended world, a quangoed regime of commissioners, inspectors, and regulators . . . , [and] important questions of truth, meaning and authenticity are sacrificed on the altar of compulsive reassurance of the critical superintendent . . . Fundamental principles about freedom, autonomy and citizenship are threatened by this state of affairs . . . Obsessional activity . . . is essentially about control rather than creativity . . . These systems may be contributing to a deterioration of standards, while maintaining a pretence that they are achieving the opposite. (Cooper, 2001)
Onora O’Neill, in her 2002 Reith Lectures, diagnoses a “crisis of trust” in contemporary society, leading to a pressure for more accountability and sanctions in the public sector. “Detailed control, an unending stream of new legislation and regulation, memoranda and instructions, guidance and advice has flooded into public sector institutions”, she writes, wryly commenting that “Central planning may have failed in the former Soviet Union but it is alive and well in Britain today”. She concludes that the relentless demand to record and report damages the real work of professionals and distorts the proper aims of professional practice. Unfortunately, “the new culture of accountability provides incentives for arbitrary and unprofessional choices” (O’Neill, 2002).
Susan Long (2008) provides an important understanding of anti-group dynamics (Nitsun, 1996), that militate against any identification with others, in organisations and society in general. She argues that organisations can become caught up in a state of pathological perversion when instrumentality outweighs relationality, when others are seen not as individuals with feelings, histories and complexities, but as objects to be used, as exploitable. This is the narcissistic position and narcissists may thrive in such an organisation. Individualism and narcissistic gratification are prioritised to the detriment of the public good. Long focuses on revealing how the dynamics of perversion get established and played out below the surface in organizations.
More recently, Wilke (2014) discusses how, in the face of constant change and permanent transitions driven by a performance management culture, these organisations generate, over time, post-traumatic stress disorder in individuals, groups and the whole organisational system. In contemporary public service organisations, driven into a state of constant flux, this book is a powerful warning about the damaging effects of this instability on the workforce and their patients or clients. Sanders et al (2011), in this connection, reflect on how a top-down system of surveillance and management can easily create shame and humiliation as threats to personal and professional integrity and moral agency within health care organisations, which may be one aspect of the cause of organisational and personal trauma.
In an interesting research study (Edwards and Crump, 2017), the researchers look at the experiences of teaching staff in a secondary school in the face of changes due to the introduction of an education reform package focused on the market, managerialism and performativity (Ball, 2003). These researchers focus on the Winnicottian concepts of wellbeing, the good enough mother, and merging to conceptualise their findings. They discovered that the teachers experience a profound dissonance between managerial ideas of how to create a successful school and their desire to support the wellbeing of themselves and their pupils. They note that management’s view of what is good for the pupils, standardised teaching and learning approaches for ‘best practice’, was markedly different to the autonomy and creativity that the teachers thought to be vital for engagement with the pupils. Most teachers felt that; ‘there has been a considerable loss of professional autonomy’. They conclude that policies, attempting to professionalise and standardise the teaching of children in order to improve the school’s local and national standing, were “felt to be ‘inauthentic’, to undermine autonomy, to limit the extent to which adult merging was possible, and ultimately to impede Winnicottian Wellbeing”.
The power and influence of management, as stated above, has increased enormously in the contemporary public services, restricting clinical practice to an increasingly well defined and rigid routine. We might wonder, in relation to the work of Menzies Lyth (1988), who argued that in the absence of outlets for work-related anxiety and emotion, prescriptive rules and working procedures had developed as a way to defend against work anxiety, whether increasing standardisation and control of work could be considered as a defence against anxiety. Rizq (2012), more recently, uses this theory to examine how defences against overwhelming anxieties relating to psychological fragility and emotional distress have led to the promotion of certain therapeutic modalities and the proliferation of bureaucratic and surveillance systems aimed at continually monitoring and evaluating staff and clinical activity. She argues that IAPT services are underpinned by structures that defend against and minimize notions of anxiety, vulnerability and dependence, and agrees with Long (2009) that systems of governance in contemporary public services constitute a perverse social defense.
The question, then, is whose anxiety and from what might the professional or organisational practice be defending? It is possible that rules, controls, and procedures could be defending management and the organization from the threat of being blamed or shamed in an increasingly litigious and transparent culture – and in this way the culture of surveillance produces unintended consequences of defensive and maladaptive practice in clinicians and managers. It seems very clear that there has been an increasingly risk-aversive culture in public services, in an attempt to manage an anxiety about blame/shame, but the defensive procedures actually create processes that are meaningless in human terms and do not deal with anxiety, but may actually serve to increase it. The fear of uncertainty, and an associated anxiety about making a wrong decision, is not contained due to guidelines and procedures being an inadequate guide to assist clinicians to manage and work with the complex clinical issues they are confronted with. In many cases the procedures actually increase the risk of clinical and therapeutic failure. We might also see this in terms of Whitaker and Lieberman’s (1965) Focal Conflict Theory in which the group or organisation adopts a restrictive solution that temporarily avoids anxiety but which does not enable the anxiety to be acknowledged and dealt with.
These changes in organisational activity and ideology have been seen to be based partly on the implementation of new forms of surveillance, scrutiny, and monitoring motivated by an interest in exerting increased control over the activities of the practitioners employed by these institutions. It has been suggested that these technologies of control amount to an “iron cage” which limits practitioner discretion (Green, 2009). Bauman (2001) argues that increased uncertainty and increased anxiety is at the core of neo-liberal agendas and the creation of a new form of interpersonal relationships founded on market individualism.
Anxiety, avoidance and a non-attachment to work are the results of these organisational dynamics (Richards and Schat, 2011). Just as is the case with an insecurely attached child, who is forced into self care modes and strategies that may be maladaptive, and whose self soothing capacities may be impaired, the insecure organisation may breed maladaptive self care and survival behaviours in its workforce. Shame may well be created in the modern public service organisation: the shamed child is powerless and found wanting. Common reactions are to either hide, to take up a position of passivity and retreat, fearing exposure, or to experience anger. Sanders et al (2011) outline how the experience of shame and humiliation in work contexts can produce social stigmatization, humiliation, scapegoating, and bullying in these organisations.
Another solution may be to reject any nurturance or feeding from an unreliable, depriving and demanding parental organisation or to conform in an aggressively passive and covertly resistant manner. We know that Mentalization capacities are impaired under conditions of stress and anxiety, and one wonders what might be the impact on psychotherapeutic and other care in a situation in which clinicians lose contact with the emotional worlds of their patients due to their own anxieties and conflicts within the context of a negative and anxiety filled organisation. There is no secure base and the organisation does not function as a base of safety from which the workforce can make creative explorations (Bowlby, 1988). We are then homeless, stateless, unsettled without a sense of assured belonging.
The research literature can be seen to confirm these interpretations. Jones (2004), for one, has documented the “profound dissatisfaction that now exists among [practitioners] about what their jobs now entail, with a growing gap arising between their daily tasks and duties, and the values that brought them into the job in the first place”. The main themes of the research to date that has been carried out on the impact of New Managerialism highlight the following areas: the de-valuing of professional skills and knowledge, the transformation of clinical relationships with clients and compromised professional identity (Wallace and Pease, 2011). Jones (2004) concludes that the impact of globalisation and marketization has resulted in demoralisation, alienation and anger among professionals. Ritzer and Malone (2000) discuss a process of “McDonaldization” whereby conventional skills and knowledge are replaced with requirements for efficiency, calculability, predictability and control through non-human technology.
In 2016 the Guardian’s Clockoff survey asked about the well-being of employees across the voluntary sector and public services. A clear picture emerged of staff working long hours, with few breaks, and a workforce that had become resigned to this way of working. When asked, do you think stress is a fact of life for employees in the public or voluntary sector, 85% of respondents said that they agreed. The Guardian concluded that “It is clear that cuts are having a sustained impact on workloads. Workers, for instance, report having more work to do, but not only are there fewer staff to deal with cases, cuts to voluntary and other bodies also mean there are fewer external support services to refer on to”. Work in health care was becoming increasingly traumatic and insecure.
More recently, Cotton (2018) carried out a survey of the therapeutic professions, surveying 1500 mental health workers and interviewing 68 of these(the survey results are available in full at www.thefutureoftherapy.org). She found that the following were at least two significant trends in the employment of these workers:
1). The Growth of precarious work: workers on short term contracts or hourly paid, running from one job to the next; the growth of fixed term or hourly paid contracts; a growing majority of people who are working in multiple settings, with several employers and using different modalities; the growth of part time work and poorly paid work; and the growth of unpaid work and self-employment.
2). Downgrading & Deprofessionalisation: the loss of psychotherapy posts, downgrading of jobs, and the employment of a lower skilled and therefore poorer paid workforce.
The pressures on psychotherapy services, within this context, are acute. The UKCP Report, Addressing the deterioration in public psychotherapy provision (2015), is based on surveys of UKCP Registrants. 52% report that psychotherapy services are being closed, 77% report an increase in complex cases, 67% report a reduction in paid hours for staff and higher band posts being cut, also an increase in the use of honorary staff and volunteers, 44% report a loss of clinical experience in staff and 37% report a loss of qualifications among practitioners in their service. These trends continue the trends reported by a UKCP report in 2012. It is increasingly the case that even complex cases receive a manualised CBT treatment from a very junior professional. Ruth Jones (2017) also writes about the absence of properly remunerated and structured psychotherapy posts and the growth of poorly paid and insecure employment.
It is clear that since the early 1980’s “middle class” and professional work has, for the first time, become defined and controlled by Fordist, Taylorist, and Managerialist ideas and practices – these principles and work practices were, of course, visited on working class work for many decades before the 1980’s. It is not unreasonable to think that the experience of significant trauma has been visited on middle class organisational life in the late 20th and 21st centuries, as it was much earlier for others. Thus, these traumas, stresses and anxieties are now shared and experienced by the majority of the population rather than being confined, and projected into, the most vulnerable members of society.
We think of the experience of trauma, amongst other things, as being attached to the process of colonisation, being deprived of identity and a unique voice. This is, indeed, the experience of many clinicians employed in the public services: of being swallowed up in a foreign country whose assumptions, ideals, and practices are far from their moral and professional ideals. Trauma is based, essentially, on the creation of an experience that cannot be consciously processed and so is driven into the unconscious, both in terms of the individual and the social unconscious. The experience cannot then be spoken of (but may appear in dreams or non-verbal artistic productions). In Hopper’s (2003) concept of Incohesion/Massification: massification demands that no-one speaks out of turn to challenge the collective repression, denial, projection, etc. Aggregation allows anyone to say or think anything on their own (in so far as that is possible) but their voice will not be heard by anyone else. The process of colonisation deprives people of a voice for a significant period of time and this constitutes a significant social and individual trauma. There are many writers on trauma and organisations of which the following are merely a selection: Kapur (2009), Wilke (2005), Hopper (2012), Blackwell (2003).
More disturbingly, Carey (2008) argues that neo-liberalism has penetrated the minds of workers at conscious and unconscious levels, restricting vision and the range of possibilities that seem to be available to a small menu recognised by the neo-liberal agenda. Certain ways of thinking are being cultured in, while others are being cultured out. It may be the case that a similar process has occurred in relation to psychotherapy: much of the pioneering work that occurred in the 1960’s and 70’s on developing innovative therapeutic traditions now seems neglected and forgotten. All of the above processes lead to a real distortion of care.
Anxieties about survival appear to be widespread in public services in modern times. Our public organisations currently celebrate megalomania and magic solutions in an attempt by our political masters, at a removed level, to excessively control people (who they apparently see as untrustworthy) in organisations that should operate on the basis of public and social trust. In the narcissistic organisation, omnipotence and the contempt for vulnerability and pain holds sway.
A Perspective on Brexit
So, why am I focusing on all of this in the context of an article about the causes of Brexit? Well, it is my belief that this cultural context of relentless control, anxieties about survival, a belief that “there is not enough to go round”, atomisation and isolation, increasing dissatisfaction, loss of status and autonomy, and loss of trust in others and public bodies, has directly affected the vote to leave the EU. It seems to me that a climate of resentment has been created that was expressed in the vote and in resentments, specifically, towards the stranger, the other, the outsider. The analysis, above, of the changes in public service organisations can be understood as a “case study” of wider social forces and changes that have created, significantly, feelings of being treated unfairly, anxieties about survival, loss of autonomy and a voice, and being alone and unsupported in a hostile world. The defense is to blame and scapegoat and to hold on rigidly to views that may demonise others or institutions. It is well known that, in extremis, people look for someone to blame: the processes of ‘scapegoating’ and ‘othering’ are well documented in the literature. So the stories are seductive in this social climate: our problems are due to an influx of foreigners threatening our livelihoods and our public services, and to paper-shuffling, ineffectual Brussels Eurocrats siphoning off billions from our national coffers. Envy of “the other”, felt to have a better deal, may well play a role in this scenario, leading to the scapegoating and persecution of minorities. There is also a “crisis of trust”: in “experts”, politicians, professionals, and others in the wider social network, leaving the individual unsupported, isolated, needing to rely on personal resources and understandings which may lead to a defensive rigidity of view.
Some further snippets from the literature that support these assertions:
In a briefing paper on the psychological impact of austerity (McGrath et al, 2016) summarises research which demonstrates how cuts to public services impact mental health in a range of ways, generating: Humiliation and shame; Fear and distrust; Instability and insecurity; Isolation and loneliness; An awareness of being trapped and powerless.
Yet further evidence, to add to the previous and prolific public information on the creation of a low wage UK, is provided by a Resolution Foundation study that appeared in February 2017, which found that men born between 1981 and 2000 in employment are earning £12,500 less in their 20s than the generation before them did at the same point in their lives – partly due to of the creation of a large number of part time jobs. They state that “While low pay is likely to be better than no pay at all, it’s troubling that the number of low-paid workers across Britain reached a record high last year.” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady commented that “Many of the jobs created since the crash are very much of the low-paid, casual and zero-hours variety. This risks many people and their families simply being left behind, unable to share in any benefit from a possible economic recovery”. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has stated in 2018 that, on current forecasts, public spending will be 13% lower by 2019-20. In the Autumn Statement in November 2016 The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that the fiscal damage from the Brexit vote would open up a 59 billion pound hole in public finances by 2020-21. Other expert predictions are of increased inflation, lowered wages and increased unemployment. In a low wage, low tax, shrinking economy and where the government is ideologically opposed to increased taxation we are talking about shrinkage in all sectors of society. It is predictable that uncertainty combined with increased austerity, uncertainty of employment, increasing stress in employment, redundancy, will create increased anxiety and other psychological difficulties.
And at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW Conference 2017, Jessica Benjamin spoke about the intersection of politics and psyche and challenged what she described as the unconscious assumption that individual survival depends on ruthless accumulation. She discussed what she termed “the rationalization of harming” as one group or nation survives at the expense of another. There was a panel which discussed issues of gender and also race and class. Franz Fanon’s work on the internalisation of oppression was referred to and there was a discussion about what was referred to as “turbo capitalism” which valorises relentless accumulation and individualism at the expense of community and contribution leading to fragilities of class, race and gender. All of the above themes echoed throughout the conference, the overarching themes of which were the increasing fragmentation of society and fear of “the other”; the increasing intolerance of debate and a polarisation of viewpoints; and the rise of authoritarianism and prejudice. It was noted that there has been an increasing awareness of the environmental and social damage created by late capitalism and the need for growth and profitability.
Additionally, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) view culture as creating its own extended metaphors that become assimilated and therefore deeply influence how we think about our lives:
Implicit, taken for granted, reified in our habits of speech, these ideas become part of a linguistic unconscious that reinforces and sustains our adaptation to our culture’s dominant values and attitudes.
There is much evidence that the choice of metaphor will shape the way we perceive the world and act on it. When politicians talk about “swarms of migrants” it invites a certain response. Metaphors become embedded in social consciousness: the menace from foreigners, the proud independence of the English, the greatness of the Empire, the vampirism of Europe sucking the life blood from our national state.
Eisold (2010) notes that:
Such myths bind generations together in shared narratives and common purposes.
In a chapter on the social and interpersonal unconscious he describes how people are influenced by their group experience, and similarly to the “security operations” of the individual, groups also collectively work to avoid information and ideas “that threaten their cohesion, that contradict what they want to believe or are afraid not to believe”. Different points of view can then be “minimised, disparaged, ridiculed and finally just ignored” akin to something of a delusional state. Eisold states that social anxieties about acceptance and inclusion and anxieties about failing at the joint task can permeate group life. In relation to contemporary society he argues that the intense dissatisfaction with the self within Western society arises from the fracture of communal structures and the emphasis placed on having and owning in late Capitalism which valorises individualism at the cost of any idea of human interconnectedness and dependency. All of these processes are exacerbated in conditions of social anxiety and distress.
It is clear that in contemporary times there has been an increase in precarity of employment, competitive pressures, and the uncoupling of income from productivity with rapidly growing inequality due to a redistribution of wealth from bottom to top. This has been created by the ascendancy of neoliberalism and its associated globalisation resulting in a coercive economic system for the majority. Anxieties about personal survival are ubiquitous in this culture. There has been an increase in possessive individualism, based on an expectation that one has to compete with others to gain personal satisfactions and this has undermined the public support to fund communal services for the mutual benefit of all – the current attacks on the BBC illustrate this dynamic. The vote to leave the EU appears to me to be a product of all the issues I have outlined above.
Finally, a personal anecdote. I attended a social discussion group in the early part of 2020 the focus of which was a discussion about how people make judgements based on emotion rather than reason. At some point there was a brief discussion about Brexit when one of the participants suddenly, and rather tangentially, declared that he was in favour of the death penalty. The statement, it seemed to me, was less striking than the manner in which it was delivered, which was a mixture of triumph and satisfaction. My impression was that for this individual, something had been released, and perhaps he had not been able to voice these thoughts for, maybe, decades in this kind of company. He was in the ascendancy, legitimised by political authority, and he had a voice that had previously been suppressed and even vilified. He is not alone: I participate in other social groups in which the phrase “I am not a racist, but…” precedes obviously racist opinions which, I think, would not have been able to be expressed so openly before the Brexit vote. It seems to me that this vote has released some dark and malignant forces in the UK that are immune and resistant to challenge, indeed, “otherness” and also holding a different opinion may be experienced as persecutory rather than being related to as an opportunity to dialogue and to understand these different positions. Pandora’s box has been opened and we will live to see the consequences…. (if we are spared the Coronavirus epidemic…)
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Terry Birchmore
birchmore@yahoo.com